Okay. I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked across the spectrum—from small digital agencies building government sites, to mid-sized companies like Rosetta Stone, to corporate giants like Verizon, AOL, and Yahoo. And throughout those years, I’ve seen every kind of engineer walk through the door. When I first started programming, there were no tutorials. No YouTube. No ChatGPT. You had to dig through documentation, forums, or straight-up reverse-engineer broken code. It was brutal—but it forced you to understand the why. Fast forward to today: you can Google a tutorial for almost anything. You can ask ChatGPT and get a clean answer in seconds. But here's the problem—real life isn’t ideal. Tutorials are. And when you rely on those ideal scenarios, you miss the actual muscle behind engineering: critical thinking. I’ve interviewed countless engineers. Many of them looked great on paper, some could even code live decently—but the moment a problem wasn’t cookie-cutter, their lack of foundational understanding showed. They didn’t know how to ask the right questions. They couldn’t navigate the real-world constraints of deadlines, compliance, technical debt, or cross-team communication. Most engineers today don’t remember the days of float layouts or clearfix hacks. Now it’s all Flex and Grid. The tools have gotten easier, but the industry? It’s only gotten more complex. Here’s my advice to every aspiring developer: - Don’t start with tutorials. Start with an idea in your head. A small one. - Build it. - Then add to it. Layer by layer. - Every time something breaks, stop and ask why. Not just how to fix it—but why it broke. That’s the essence of engineering. Because in business, you rarely start from scratch. You inherit messes. You work with existing systems. You stack new features onto aging infrastructure. You deal with teams, deadlines, EC2 servers, CORS errors, payment systems, WebSockets, compliance layers—and no tutorial prepares you for that. Gextron didn’t start as complex as it is today. Back when I was making videos about it, it was simpler. Now, with real paying users, it's grown into something no tutorial could explain. It’s got layers of real-world complexity—and only someone who’s built and built upon it over time can navigate that.

New here! console.log('Ready to code!');